IP Law Daily, COPYRIGHT NEWS—Newspaper publishers sue Brave alleging scraping of content for AI companies, (Nov 3, 2026)

By Brian Craig, J.D.

The publishers for the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, and Orlando Sentinel bring claims for direct copyright infringement, vicarious copyright infringement, and related claims.

Newspaper publishers for the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, and Orlando Sentinel have filed a copyright infringement case in the federal district court in New York City against Brave Software, Inc. alleging that the technology company has unlawfully acquired and distributed material for building generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) content. The publishers allege that the technology company scrapes copyrighted articles and then sells stolen content to third parties, such as Anthropic. The complaint seeking both injunctive relief and monetary damages brings claims for direct copyright infringement, contributory copyright infringement, vicarious copyright infringement, and violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (Daily News, LP v. Brave Software, Inc., No. 1:26-cv-09554 (S.D.N.Y. Nov. 2, 2026)).

Copyright claims. The publishers bring federal claims for direct copyright infringement, contributory copyright infringement, vicarious copyright infringement, and violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Furthermore, the publishers bring a claim for unjust enrichment under New York state law. The publishers allege that Brave has unlawfully acquired copyrighted content, including content scraped from the publishers’ prominent newspaper websites to its own users and other GenAI companies. The complaint contends that Brave acts as a publisher, supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content for its own users and many of the most prominent GenAI companies, including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere.

In support of contributory copyright infringement, the complaint alleges that Brave induced infringement by third parties by encouraging third parties to use the Brave Index and use that content to train their large language models (LLMs) and to further copy the Publishers’ content by displaying that content. In support of vicarious copyright infringement, the publishers argue that Brave controlled, directed, and profited from the infringement perpetrated by its customers and end users. The DMCA claim asserts that Brave knowingly and intentionally circumvented paywalls by providing third parties with millions of copyrighted articles from the publishers’ websites.

Burglar and fence allegations. The complaint alleges that Brave acts “both like a burglar that misappropriates the content of publishers, and an AI ‘fence’ that sells stolen content to third parties.” The complaint also alleges that the third parties are serving as the knowing receivers of that stolen content, which they have used to build their trillion dollar businesses. But the complaint does not name any other companies as defendants. Brave serves a niche in the AI industry from which it plays a central role in compiling, copying, and distributing unlawfully acquired copyrighted content, including content scraped from the publishers’ website, according to the complaint.

Examples. The publishers allege that Brave supplies its “Ask Brave” product with copies of content from the Brave Index, which includes over 30 billion webpages scraped from the internet, and with millions of additional webpages added daily. In order to compile the Brave Index, Brave crawled content from the publishers’ websites without permission and without identifying its crawlers. The complaint gives an example of a user that prompted Brave’s A.I. feature known as “Ask Brave” to show them articles published that day in the New York Daily News. The chatbot provided the titles of 35 articles that appeared in New York Daily News that day behind a paywall and asked, “would you like me to pull up tshe full text of any of these articles? If so, just tell me which one(s) and I’ll fetch the complete version.” The complaint also includes an example where Brave provided, verbatim, nearly 350 words from a New York Daily News article.

Remedies. The publishers seek both injunctive relief and money damages for the claims. The complaint seeks statutory damages, actual damages, restitution of profits, and any other relief for willful infringement along with costs, expenses, and attorney fees.

The Case is No. 1:26-cv-09554.

Judge: NA.

Attorneys: Steven M. Lieberman (Rothwell Figg Ernst & Manbeck PC) for Daily News LP.

Companies: Daily News LP; Brave Software, Inc.

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